Riobamba

Hello! How is everyone doing? Getting excited for Thanksgiving? I know it's been a while since I posted. And it's been a while since I actually went on this trip, but better late than never, right? I went to Riobamba, a city south of Quito. From there you can take a train through the mountains on what is supposed to be one of the most beautiful routes in Ecuador. I went with my friend, Chris, and we had a few difficulties in the trip, but it ended up being successful.

Since it is "winter" right now in Ecuador, they don't use the usual train, but instead this weird bus/train. There weren't any tickets left from Riobamba, so we took a train/bus down what is supposed to be the most interesting part of the ride. It's pictured above: the "nariz del diablo" (nose of the devil). It's an impressive land formation, and the tracks going down it zig-zag, so you go backward and then forward. There's sometimes when you look down and cant see the path, only the drop off.















To make it more interesting, you can sit on top of the train. This is actually a picture of people getting off the train, but you can see people on the top. It was quite a process to actually get to sit on the top, so we were pretty excited when we finally got up there.































Another attraction of this train is that it de-rails often. We made it almost the whole trip with no problems, but at the very end we slid off the track a little. You can't really see it very well in this picture, but I promise it happened. We had to walk back to the station. Overall, the trip was quite an adventure. We spent a lot of hours sitting down in various forms of transportation. It was a good time.